


The Blame Game

by lolwhythough



Category: Teen Titans (Animated Series), Teen Titans (Comics), Teen Titans - All Media Types
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-16
Updated: 2018-12-16
Packaged: 2019-09-20 00:58:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,481
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17012511
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lolwhythough/pseuds/lolwhythough
Summary: Garfield apologizes to two people he has disappointed in the past.Raven listens.





	The Blame Game

He thinks he hears someone yell. 

He realizes it’s him. 

He’s curled and writhing on the ground, spitting curses and he’s sure if he looked down, he’d see claws trying to pierce their way through his gloves. 

There’s noise and it blurs the world around him. There’s also this soft murmuring that’s coming from… somewhere. It does little to stem his panic. 

Because he sees them, his parents. 

They’re so, so disappointed in him because he let them fall, didn’t he? 

A cool, gentle hand cups his face and he lunges out for it, gripping it tight. Not too tight, he can’t hurt anyone else. Can’t. He can’t. He. 

“Beast boy?” The voice he recognizes, realizes there’s something off about it. Someone’s worried. He tries to calm down. 

He can’t. 

He realizes he’s talking now. His mouth is moving on its own, he knows this because he would never, could never admit the words that stumble out. 

“My fault. I didn’t—I couldn’t even watch.” 

The hand around his squeezes reassuringly and it gives him the courage to open his eyes again. When did he shut them? He swallows and looks up at the Logans. Their faces are contorted with fury. They have every right to be upset with him. It’s his fault. 

“I didn’t even watch you fall. I didn’t—” He tries to sit up and there’s a sharp pain in his stomach and hands, too many to be just from the voice, are pushing him back down. His mother’s frown deepens and she turns her back. 

His father is already gone. 

“Wait!” His voice is hoarse now, had he been crying? He fights against the hands and they push harder and it hurts but not nearly as much as watching Marie Logan’s combat boots walk away. 

“Sleep.” 

He feels his muscles relax and he slumps back. Someone catches his head. “Sorry.” He breathes as blackness creeps into his vision. “M’sorry.”  
When he comes to there’s a soft beeping that alerts him he’s hooked up to a heart monitor. His eyes struggle to open and it’s still a little blurry, but his parents are gone. Instead, the entire team is sitting around him. 

He’s not sure if he’s relieved. He’s worried that he is, and immediately feels awful. 

“Hey!” Cyborg. “Hey! His eyes are open!” He hears more than sees the four of them close in on his bed. 

“H-“ He tries to clear his throat. There’s an ache that’s all over and he almost regrets opening his eyes at all. God, he’s so tired. “Hey.” He can’t think of anything clever to say. 

Raven saves him from talking too much by answering his burning question. “You got hit with some kind of drug. It took us a while to figure it out. Turns out it was similar to an extreme form Lysergic acid diethylamide.”

They nailed him with some weird LSD? Now, that was embarrassing. It wasn’t a fancy, schmancy super villain drug. No, it was just some party drug gone haywire. Gar chokes out a small laugh and immediately doubles over with a grunt. 

“They gave you a nasty stab to the stomach.” Robin’s voice pops up, not without sympathy. “The combined blood loss and unknown chemicals caused a reaction.” 

“Reaction?” Gar manages to hiss out once he’s caught his breath. 

“You freaked out, B.” A whirring, mechanical arm rested itself on his shoulder. “Raven had to do her whole emotion-eating thing.” 

He blearily glances over to her and hopes his smile comes off as reassuring despite the fangs. And the fact he’s barely awake. She blinks at him. 

“We should let him rest.” She stands. Right. She probably felt his exhaustion. So, he felt a little less bad when he felt himself slump back. 

He wakes up and Ravens the only one in the room. The first thing she does is hand him a glass of water and he downs all of it, leaving his stomach feeling full and sloshy. He tries giving talking another go. 

“You guys taking shifts?” He asks.

“Yes.” He meant it as a joke but her bluntness has him frowning. 

“Was it really that bad? I mean I know I had a little episode and a scratch or whatever but—” 

“You were hurting yourself.” She doesn’t look at him when she says it. He swallows thickly.  
“Er. I didn’t say anything weird, did I?” 

She thinks for a moment “Falling. You talked a lot about falling.” 

He sits there for a while, and secretly hopes that Raven is okay with the silence. He wrinkled his nose, brainstorming ways to steer the conversation away from his weird, sad childhood. 

“Yeah. Falling is pretty scary. But, you know, I always thought my drug-induced nightmares would be more along the lines of seeing zombies and stuff.” He knows better than to laugh with his healing stitches, so he huffs a breath through his nose. 

“Wanna know something funny?” Her mouth is quirked up but she looks sad. No, she doesn’t just look sad, she looks sad, for him.

“What?” He asks. His insides churn. 

“I would have thought the same thing.” He laughs this time and it hurts. But when he opens his eyes Raven is still looking at him in that weird, sad way. He doesn’t deserve it. 

“…I guess. Well, I don’t really owe you an explanation.” He says it like stone, hard and chipped. “But, I kind of feel like I should give you one.” His fingers twitch and Raven’s hand reaches out and grasps his hand. He smiles, but the sick feeling in his stomach sits heavy. 

“I’d say I want to give you one but, uh.” 

“You don’t” 

“You got me.” He laughed and again, it hurt. “Nah, I really don’t.” 

“But?” 

“But I want you to know. So there’s really no other way to go about it.” 

“You could write me a letter.” She teases, giving him a smile that warms his entire body. He loves it when she makes jokes. She’s good at it. 

“Yeah. I’ll pop it in your mailbox. Better yet, I’ll shoot you an email!” She laughs and the sound of it is pitchy and high. He glows. “A text!” 

“A carrier pigeon.” 

“Scribbled on a gum wrapper!” 

“Written in the steam on the bathroom mirror.” 

They go on for a little while longer and he finally feels like he can breathe the air in the room again. It’s millions of millions times better that the crushing reminder strangling him before. He has a feeling Raven went along with the joke for so long because she knew he needed this. 

His eyes turned sad, but his mouth remained upturned. “Well, I guess the first thing to know is that I was already green.” He nudged her, “It’s important to the plot.” 

“Anyway, we were all on this tiny little canoe. Me, a little green kid. My parents, world-renowned scientist. All on a boat. The place had flooded so we weren’t really…going anywhere, you know?” 

He laughs a little at that. 

“I thought, you know, oh no! My house and all those animals. Are my toys and stuff gunna be okay?” He swallowed thickly and Raven rubbed small circles into the top of his hand. 

“Then, there was this, I don’t know, cliff? I guess you’d call it a waterfall at this point. My Dad told me to go. I knew how to turn into a little bird, not sure which one. I argued with him until we were almost at the edge, wasted a lot of time doing that.” 

He was squeezing his eyes shut now, remembering the sound of rushing water. His Dad was mad, so mad. His mom just looked scared. 

“He practically threw me out of the thing. And then I left. I flew to a tree branch, didn’t even watch them hit the water. There’s no way they’d survive. You know there were, rocks and stuff at the bottom. Didn’t stop me from looking afterword’s, though.” 

His mouth his dry and he focuses on the way Raven’s cool fingertips traced his knuckles. 

“You don’t want me to say I’m sorry.” She murmured. He shook his head. 

“I’m not the one who deserves an apology.” 

“You also don’t want me to say it wasn’t your fault.” 

“I don’t.”

“I’m sorry but It’s not your fault.” Raven eyes flicked up to meet his and shock overtook his features. For a moment they sat in horrified silence. 

Then, Garfield Logan laughed. Hard and real. In fact, he was laughing so hard that he felt the stitches in his abdomen pull a little too hard. 

“It wasn’t that funny!” Raven hissed, pressing a glowing hand to his stomach. “Stop!”

But he couldn’t help it. Raven hadn’t looked at him with pity or shock or disgust. Instead, she made a joke. 

And he loved jokes.


End file.
